Why do ordinary people turn to psychology in the hopes of making themselves healthier, wealthier, and happier? Governed by Affect offers a multi-sited history of psychology and its role in American public life. Focusing on a series of transformations since the 1970s, the book examines the rise of psychology as a health science and the discipline's growing entanglements with public policy inspired new theories of inattentive and unconscious affect, which have come to structure health care, education, the economy, and how we understand ourselves.
Governing Affects explores the neoliberal transformation of state governance in Europe towards affective forms of dominance exercised by customer-oriented neo-bureaucracies and public service providers. By investigating the rise of affective labour in contemporary European service societies and the conversion of state administrations into business-like public services, the authors trace the transformative power of neoliberal political thought as it is put into practice. The book examines new affective modes of subjectivation and activation of public employees, as well as their embodiment of affective requirements, to successfully guide and advise citizens. Neoliberalism induces a double agency in neo-bureaucrats: entrepreneurialism is coupled with affective skills for the purpose of governing clients in their own best interests. These competences are unevenly distributed between the genders, as their affective dispositions differ historically. Drawing on the theoretical concepts of Foucault and Bourdieu, the book offers innovative insights into recent processes of state transformation, affective subjectivation, and changes in labour relations. By combining theory building on governance with empirical research in key areas of state power, the book will be of interest to scholars and researchers in a broad range of disciplines, including political science, political sociology, and critical governance studies.
Roberto E. Barrios presents an ethnographic study of the aftermaths of four natural disasters: southern Honduras after Hurricane Mitch; New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina; Chiapas, Mexico, after the Grijalva River landslide; and southern Illinois following the Mississippi River flood. Focusing on the role of affect, Barrios examines the ways in which people who live through disasters use emotions as a means of assessing the relevance of governmentally sanctioned recovery plans, judging the effectiveness of such programs, and reflecting on the risk of living in areas that have been deemed prone to disaster. Emotions such as terror, disgust, or sentimental attachment to place all shape the meanings we assign to disasters as well as our political responses to them. The ethnographic cases in Governing Affect highlight how reconstruction programs, government agencies, and recovery experts often view postdisaster contexts as opportune moments to transform disaster-affected communities through principles and practices of modernist and neoliberal development. Governing Affect brings policy and politics into dialogue with human emotion to provide researchers and practitioners with an analytical toolkit for apprehending and addressing issues of difference, voice, and inequity in the aftermath of catastrophes.
During the past decade a diverse group of disciplines have simultaneously intensified their attention upon the scientific study of emotion. This proliferation of research on affective phenomena has been paralleled by an acceleration of investigations of early human structural and functional development. Developmental neuroscience is now delving into the ontogeny of brain systems that evolve to support the psychobiological underpinnings of socioemotional functioning. Studies of the infant brain demonstrate that its maturation is influenced by the environment and is experience-dependent. Developmental psychological research emphasizes that the infant's expanding socioaffective functions are critically influenced by the affect-transacting experiences it has with the primary caregiver. Concurrent developmental psychoanalytic research suggests that the mother's affect regulatory functions permanently shape the emerging self's capacity for self-organization. Studies of incipient relational processes and their effects on developing structure are thus an excellent paradigm for the deeper apprehension of the organization and dynamics of affective phenomena. This book brings together and presents the latest findings of socioemotional studies emerging from the developmental branches of various disciplines. It supplies psychological researchers and clinicians with relevant, up-to-date developmental neurobiological findings and insights, and exposes neuroscientists to recent developmental psychological and psychoanalytic studies of infants. The methodology of this theoretical research involves the integration of information that is being generated by the different fields that are studying the problem of socioaffective development--neurobiology, behavioral neurology, behavioral biology, sociobiology, social psychology, developmental psychology, developmental psychoanalysis, and infant psychiatry. A special emphasis is placed upon the application and incorporation of current developmental data from neurochemistry, neuroanatomy, neuropsychology, and neuroendocrinology into the main body of developmental theory. More than just a review of several literatures, the studies cited in this work are used as a multidisciplinary source pool of experimental data, theoretical concepts, and clinical observations that form the base and scaffolding of an overarching heuristic model of socioemotional development that is grounded in contemporary neuroscience. This psychoneurobiological model is then used to generate a number of heuristic hypotheses regarding the proximal causes of a wide array of affect-related phenomena--from the motive force that drives human attachment to the proximal causes of psychiatric disturbances and psychosomatic disorders, and indeed to the origin of the self.
Most attempts to trace the roots of current scientific approaches to the mind have ignored the contributions of post-Kantian German idealism. Paul Redding here shows the relevance of this philosophical tradition to an understanding of the mind and its embodiment as well as the relation of feeling to cognition. Redding observes how Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel struggled with the problem of reconciling Kant's normative approach to experience and thought with the naturalistic stance of the emerging medical sciences. A century later William James, Freud, and Jung also addressed the interconnection of thought and feeling, reaching views similar to those of the post-Kantian idealists. In particular, Redding argues, the idealists conceived of a'logic of affect'that reemerged in Freud's concept of the primary process and in modern evolutionary ideas of subcortical processing. This innovative book demonstrates how new insights can be brought to the study of mentality and consciousness by considering previously overlooked interpretations. Redding shows that these early theorists of the unconscious can bring scholars to a better appreciation not only of classical thinkers like James and Freud but also of contemporary debates about the mind and emotions.
Through a true communion with God, argues the author, it is possible to treat any and all problems-from loneliness to envy to gray hair and even bad investments. But the prayer that Rawson speaks of is based not upon supplication to an omnipotent being who may or may not be listening, but on a simple process of denial and affirmation. Using an exhaustive list of examples, Rawson shows how to first deny the problem, then affirm what he calls "the absolute good." It is only by dwelling on "God's perfect world" that one can find true healing. This is essential reading to the faithful, and a work of genuine curiosity to everyone else. British engineer, businessman, and author FREDERICK LAWRENCE RAWSON (1859-1923) also wrote How to Bring About Permanent Peace (1916), Secret of Divine Protection (1918) and Nature of True Prayer (1920).
The focus of this book is community-based health care with community health workers as a critical workforce in health improvement. Professionals, policy makers, managers, and service providers need to grasp the critical fact that engaging people from their own perspective is vital to health-seeking behaviors. This book explores case studies illustrating experiences with community engagement and the techniques used for successful Community Based Health Care (CBHC). It will be of interest to students training to be health care professionals, service providers, and managers of health services, policy makers, researchers and academics.
This introduction to the study of politics explores the multiple meanings of ""governance"" as well as the several senses of what it means to be a ""subject."" It takes the reader on a journey through and across the domains of law and institutions, markets and power, and culture and identity, and shows how the understanding of any one of these domains demands an understanding of them all. The path through these related regions is marked by regular encounters with leading and competing thinkers-from the expected, such as James Madison, Robert Dahl, Michel Foucault, and Adam Smith, to the une.
